Leading for Optimal Performance : A Program for Executive Management


This cutting-edge week-long program is a rare opportunity for senior executives to step away from their everyday workplace pressures to join a group of peers and focus on what they will need to do to excel in today’s competitive and rapidly changing business environment.

Do you lead, manage and influence people?  Do you seek to take your organization in a different direction? Do your responsibilities include enhancing organizational performance, engaging workers, finding innovative solutions to the new marketplace realities, strategic thinking, managing conflict or negotiating with internal and external stakeholders?  If so, then this program was created to help you:

  • Explore, acquire and refine the personal and organizational skills you need to be an outstanding leader in your field of endeavour
  • Enhance your negotiating presence by discovering new tactics necessary to influence others and create mutual profit improvement solutions 
  • Understand how people and organizations respond to change, how to overcome resistance and build high performance teams
  • Define and implement ways to create a culture that nurtures creativity and innovation 
  • Adopt and adapt best practices performance measurement tools aimed at increasing your organization’s value
  • Learn techniques for identifying your organization’s competitive weaknesses and strengths and identify strategies for enhancing productivity and performance
  • Build a culture of accountability that liberates and leverages your organization’s intellectual, human and structural capital
  • Link tactical action plans to your organization’s overall strategic direction
  • Become the “go-to” person for designing practical and innovative business solutions and implementing needed change initiatives
  • Identify, evaluate and select profitable business opportunities while managing risk
  • Enrich your organization through the acquisition of new ideas, best practices and innovative business solutions
  • Build a new network of seasoned professional contacts for future opportunities and partnerships.

This is a five-day intensive, residential executive development program of which Dr. Murray teaches the first 3.5 days (the remaining two days are more technical in focus and are taught by Dr. Vijay Jog – see below). The full curriculum for the section of the program taught by Dr. Murray is as follows:

21st Century Leadership: What does it take?                               

Challenges, realities and imperatives of 21st century leadership. The demands on leadership: Why CEOs get fired. The essence of leadership today: Critical traits and skill sets. Distinguishing leaders from managers: The need for role clarity. Where managers fit in the success equation: Managers who lead. What leaders need to know and do: The leadership prescription. Rethinking success: Imperatives, caveats and enablers. Thinking differently: Achieving focus and mindfulness. Assessing your leadership potential. Doing business in 2020.

Managing Change: Harnessing Intellectual & Structural Capital

The causes, drivers and imperatives of change in the New Economy. Risk or opportunity: Detecting high impact surprises. The need for change and efforts to address it. Uncomfortable truths about managing change. The costs of and reasons for failed change. Steps in the process: Leading theories. The keys to successfully leading change initiatives. Becoming a change agent: Primary skill sets and tasks. Diagnosing what ails and prescribing workable remedies. The value of intellectual capital and the disconnect in execution. The speed, costs, steps and predictable dynamics of change. Dealing with resistance entitlement. Communicating the need to change: Do’s and don’ts. New rules of the workplace: Creating a culture of accountability. Overview of methods, tactics and tools. Executive alignment: Getting the senior team on the same page. Strategic planning essentials: Principles, process, relationships, architecture. Translating corporate values into discernable behaviours. Guidelines for sustaining successful change initiatives.

Managing Conflict: Confrontation, Behaviour Modification and Mediation Skills 

Primary causes and barriers to conflict resolution: Functions and dysfunctions. Understanding conflict as an opportunity for growth, change and progress. The psychology of conflict: Principles and important basics to remember. Handling confrontation intelligently and influencing unintentional behaviours. The subtle art of dealing with really difficult people: Warriors, whiners, wafflers and wimps. The art of mediation: When to mediate or when not to mediate. Critical aspects of successful mediations: The role, attributes, functions and essential elements. Steps in the process and corresponding tactics. Mediating contentious values conflicts.

Managing Teams: Engaging Workers & Building High Performance

Basic tenets and important questions to answer before you build. Criteria and attributes of an effective team. Diagnosing team dysfunctions: what stifles teamwork. Critical challenges and antibodies that constrain performance. Principles and tactics of engagement: How to “turn on” workers. Building trust: The fuel that drives agile and resilient entities. The art of giving and soliciting feedback. Efficiency: Ideas/tools for accomplishing more in less time. Becoming stress and dispute-free: Requirements and tools. Motivating unmotivated and end-of-career employees. Getting people to work smart, not hard. Developing self-managed teams. Role of managers in a high performance workplace. Finding and attracting “the right people” to manage.

Managing Innovation: Encouraging & Leveraging Intellectual Capital                        

What the future portends. Practical implementation: Evaluating, presenting and selling ideas. Future focussing: Designing a business strategy for 2020. Defining innovation. Forces that will shape the future. Managing the essential paradoxes. The type of innovation that’s right for your organization. Uncomfortable truths: How leaders deal with innovation. Building the commitment: Key attributes, capabilities and surprises. Innovation myths, realities and bullets. Reality testing experimentation. Auditing the DNA. Organizational conditioning, antibodies and constraints Radical vs. incremental innovation: Structures and tools. Balancing creativity with execution. Keys to developing an innovation strategy. Job description for the CIO. Rules for nurturing innovation. Overview of techniques, tactics and tools. Building/sustaining a culture of innovation. Next steps.

The topics covered by Dr. Jog on days 4 and 5 include the following:

  • Designing a Successful Enterprise: Earning the Sustainable Right to Succeed
  • Managing Strategy: Crafting & Executing Strategy
  • Managing Value:  Value Creation and Linking to Strategy
  • Managing Organizational Performance:  Beyond Financial Performance
  • Managing with Information: Profitability Analytics, Intelligence and Dashboards.